without moving her head. Big beams supported the ceiling and she could see many spiders’ webs. Was it a stable? No. It was much bigger than that. There were no rugs and no mattress to sleep on. It couldn’t be someone’s house. At least it didn’t look like one, except for the stone floor. The girl had a stone floor at home too. But there the stones were always warm. Here, they were icy cold.
The girl shuddered but immediately straightened up again. She tried to stand up as straight as she could. Danilo, too, had pushed out his chest and raised his chin. But not Ester. She just cried. She held her hands in front of her face and refused to stop.
The man went up to Ester and said something in a loud voice. She didn’t understand what he said. Nor did any of the other children. So Ester cried even louder. Then the man raised his hand and hit her so hard that she fell down backward. He waved to the other two grown-ups who stood by the wall. They got hold of Ester’s arms and legs and carried her out. That was the last time she saw Ester.
The man walked slowly toward her, stopped, then leaned forward until his face was only a couple of centimeters away from hers. With eyes cold as ice, he said something in Swedish which she later would never forget.
“Don’t cry,” he said. “Never cry anymore. Never ever.”
MIA BOLANDER SAT with the others in the conference room for the last briefing of the day. They were going over a number of question marks in the murder investigation of Hans Juhlén. The most important surrounded the boy whose picture was now displayed on the large screen.
Gunnar Öhrn had given high priority to the as-yet unnamed boy. He was either directly connected to the murder, or he was a key witness in the investigation. Regardless, he had to be found. That meant even more door-to-door canvassing to ask if anybody could identify the boy.
Mia was pleased that she had left that sort of drudgery when she was promoted. Questioning neighbors wasn’t a challenge in the slightest. Absolutely nothing was exciting about it.
She was the first to help herself to the biggest cinnamon bun on the dish in the middle of the conference table. She was a competitive person, and could thank her elder brothers for that. In her childhood, everything had been about being first. Her brothers, who were five and six years older than she, had fought over who could do the most press-ups, who could race to the corner first and who could stay awake the longest. Mia struggled to impress her brothers, but they never let her win. Not even in something as silly as her memory.
So it had become natural for Mia to compete about virtually everything and this instinct had never waned. Since she had also been gifted with a decidedly volatile temperament, many of her classmates at school let her have her own way. Even in junior secondary school she had on several occasions been sent home for getting into fights with older pupils.
In her fifth year at the school, she had hit a classmate so hard that she drew blood. She could still remember the boy, her own age with a wide nose. He used to tease her and throw gravel at her during the PE lessons. He was also the only pupil who could run the 100 meter dash faster than she. He hadn’t gone unpunished. After a lesson one day, Mia had kicked him so hard on his shin, he had to go to the school nurse and then on to the hospital to deal with a crack in his bone. That in turn had almost gotten her suspended, but she claimed it was an accident. The incident was noted on her school record by the headmaster, but Mia couldn’t care less. She had run the fastest at the next PE lesson. That was all that mattered.
Mia gobbled up the rest of the bun. The granulated sugar fell onto the table and she scooped it all into a tiny mound, then licked her fingertip and used it to pick up the sugar and put it in her mouth.
Mia had almost no friends during her school years. When she was thirteen, her eldest brother died in a gang fight and she decided to go against the flow. At first she was forced to survive her tough suburban neighborhood where you were supposed to stick out as much as you could. Piercing, dyed hair, partly shaved head, no hair, tattoos, cuts, open wounds—nothing was alien. Not even for Mia, who herself had pushed a needle through one eyebrow just to fit in. But what distinguished her from the others was her attitude. She actually wanted to make something of her life. And with the help of her cocky attitude and her competitive spirit, she made it through school. She had decided that she wasn’t going to be a loser like her brother.
Mia helped herself to yet another cinnamon bun, then she held the dish out to Henrik, who shook his head no.
By now they had already spent close to an hour discussing how the boy might be involved in the case. Ola showed a frozen image of the boy from the security camera file. He was slightly turned away, crossing the street.
With the help of the keyboard, Ola showed more, image after image. They appeared one by one at a slow pace. The team followed the boy’s steps until the last thing to disappear was his hood.
Henrik picked up his cell and compared the images on the screen with that of Lasse Johansson’s son, Simon. He remarked that any suspicions against Simon were now dismissed.
“The nephew is shorter, more muscular. The boy on the picture is thinner,” he said.
“Let’s see.” Ola stretched to reach Henrik’s phone and looked at the digital photo.
“And this Simon has reddish hair. I think our guy is darker. That’s what it looks like, anyway,” said Henrik.
“Okay, so we can forget Simon, but that still leaves the question—who is the boy? We must get hold of him,” said Gunnar and moved on to the telephone log. Ola, who usually checked all the technical details, had been fully occupied with the security camera film so, to hurry the process along, Gunnar had chosen to check the lists himself. Now he pushed copies of the log into the middle of the table and let each of them take one.
Henrik took a gulp of coffee and looked at the first page.
“Hans Juhlén’s last call was on Sunday at 18:15 to the Miami pizzeria. Ola?”
Ola got up and noted the call on the time line on the wall.
“The phone call has been confirmed by the pizzeria and they also confirmed that he picked up the pizza at 18:40. You can see the other calls on the next page,” he said.
They all turned to page two.
“There weren’t many,” said Henrik.
“No, there are only a few. Most of them are to or from his wife. There is an outgoing call to a car service, but nothing remarkable about that,” said Gunnar.
“What about texts?” said Mia.
“Nothing strange there either,” said Gunnar.
Mia folded up the pages and threw them onto the table. “So what do we do now?”
“We must find that boy,” said Gunnar.
“Do we know anything about the half brother?” Anneli wondered aloud.
“Not much. Mia and I just interviewed him. He is single, on welfare, he says, with some kind of shared custody of his child. And he is addicted to gambling,” Henrik answered.
“Does he have a criminal record?” said Mia.
“No,” said Gunnar.
